America’s housing crisis continues to worsen, renters are struggling more than homeowners, report says
America’s housing crisis continues to worsen | CNN Business
Why is the for profit house building industry involved in solving the problem they had a hand in making?
Reform the CPA and just build ourselves. Or use the army core of engineers. They are getting paid either way.
Non-profit / below market housing is crucial. Without it, the people who actually keep cities functioning and interesting, service workers, artists, etc get pushed out.
I have a career that enables me to pay a lot of money for housing but I don't want to live in a neighbourhood that only consists of people like me, cause I'm boring as fuck. I also don't want to be part of the reason those people get displaced.
More social housing now!
Raise property taxes 500% for property that is not registered as the owners primary residence.
That should do it
The solution is to build more housing where people want to live.
Don't get suckered into their blame game. This just results in everybody pointing fingers while the prices continue to soar.
Prices only go up because there's competition to buy them.
Tax and other policies encourage the parasitic behavior.
The solution is making it illegal to own more than a few properties
This problem does not have a single solution. Get rid of landlords and you're still left with a large group of people fighting over a limited supply. Better zoning laws, removal of parking minimums, better transit + micro-mobility infrastructure, and more below market not-for-profit housing.
It's not a simple problem, even if the motives that created the problem are.
that will make it easier for people to buy, and even harder to rent. Ie. that will worsen the problem.
EDIT: it's apparent that Lemmy users don't understand why someone would actively want to rent, and think everyone wants to buy. This makes the entire topic very difficult to discuss.
"More supply will increase demand"
Hmmm
What do you think drives the price of rentals? Not being able to afford to buy keeps people stuck in rental living where they can be price gouged. If the price of houses drops due to an oversupply, more renters will buy, which reduces demand for rentals, which will drive down the price of rent making it more affordable to rent.
Build. Social. Housing.
Its not a difficult concept. The “market” is not going to build anything that lowers the price. The market is not going to build anything fast enough. The market is absolutely not going to give a flying fuck about building to create communities.
The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until
Let's go people!
The market will built it normally, the government doesn't allow them to.
If you really want to incentive building then you need a land value tax.
My piece of total shit landlord just took 4 months to fix my bathroom then raised rent an absurd amount. I’m enraged.
This is something I'm currently struggling with. I rent a house and the roof is leaking in two different rooms. Problem is that last time I had the landlord do any repairs he increased my rent by $300 a month. I know that having a leaky roof is damaging his property, but it's only a minor inconvenience for me at the moment.
I'm not about to spend an extra $6,000+ a year just to preserve his property when I can keep it from bothering me with a tack, some string, and a pitcher for the water to go into.
I mean he had to pay for the repairs somehow /s
What are you going to do about it?
We don't need tax credits.
We need Private equity out of the housing market.
We need better safeguards for tenants.
Financial moves like tax credits and incentives always end up benefitting the haves.
We actually need Mom and Pop landlords abolished. They own 80% of rentals.
Imo owning a second property to rent out for some side cash is fine. It's a problem when your only occupation is "landlord"
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47332.pdf
Wow. 70% as of 2022.
That's idiotic. There's nothing wrong with owning rentals or being a landlord. It only becomes an issue when massive corporations with endless amount of money buy so much inventory that they start affecting the market
How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned? People and organizations can still own as many properties as they want, but at some point they're going to be taxed so much it'll be impossible to profit off of them.
Until we actually remove republicans and republican lites from the legislature I highly doubt we'll see any progressive tax reforms, like actually taxing the rich. You could probably find more support for expanding house buying programs. Stuff like lowering the down payment requirements, and or give a large grant for a portion of the house value if it is high and it could be clawed back at sale.
Personally, I'd prefer a monthly fine for unfilled housing, that is based on the rate you are charging for it. Landlord wants to jack your rent up 20%? If you leave, they pay a fine, based on that amount until they fill the unit. The fines go to subsidizing housing costs, so there is a self-balancing system. Right now, with property values increasing at insane rates, owners don't really need to rent to break even, which leaves them free to price gouge their tenants. There is little pressure pushing rates back down, and there is all the freedom in the world to jack them up as high as you want.
The problem right now is one of supply and demand, not because corporations are buying up too many properties. It's the other way around where corporations are buying up properties, because due to not increasing supply, and demand continue rising, it's a good investment.
We need more high density housing all over the place. I live in a nice little town right outside a large US city. We have a train right into the city, and a nice little downtown area that could certainly use more business. They have been trying to put up apartment buildings, but the NIMBY-ism is through the roof. It's like every little attempt to add more housing, people start whining to high heavens how it is killing our "small town" feel. I mean, I get it, I moved here for a reason, but something has got to give.
I can only imagine what's happening in more rural areas where everyone wants their big lots and single homes.
So I don't really oppose increasing taxes per home, but I don't think it's really going to solve the issue of increasing home prices as that's not the root of the issue.
How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned?
That's functionally how the homestead exemption works already
they’re going to be taxed so much it’ll be impossible to profit off of them.
I would simply start a PAC with all my extra money and bribe/coerce politicians into reducing the tax rates.
That’s functionally how the homestead exemption works already
Unless I'm mistaken, that's just a small tax break you get on the taxes on your primary residence. After that, it makes no difference the number of properties you own, their taxes stay the same.
I'm not sure. Realizing I had no idea how much wealth the truly wealthy possess has been a reoccurring theme from the past few years. I think I'd rather see some hard limitations on who can own what.
It's already like that where I live. It's called the homestead exemption -- property taxes are cut in half if it's your primary residence
Could that be because those homeowners are charging rents high enough to cover both mortgage and insurance and more on the rented property?
Correct. In capitalism one must profit off the necessities of life.
Also, when you buy a house, the cost of the mortgage is locked in...assuming you don't do an adjustable rate mortgage which were never designed for long term homeownership.
Yessum. I knew someone who put 20k down on a house after saving for awhile, this was back in late 2010s. Locked in $385/mo. Still had the yearly taxes, which weren't the worst.
I am not sure why you think it should be any way else with our current systems, though. Asking less means the home owner is effectively paying for maintenance and upkeep entirely out of pocket, and entirely net loss for them. That said, I also don't think that means they need to price gouge and trying to make huge profits.
It’s not a net loss. Renter’s pay can be used for maintenance or equity or anything else. Since houses don’t depreciate in this market and maintenance costs are not even close to rent, the landlord only gains.
An equitable method would beto splitthe cost of mortgage and insurance between the property owner and the renter. 60/40, 50/50 etc. Having the renter foot the entire bill with no benefit other than occupancy is just not a fair deal imho.
You can only live in one location at any given time, so the fact someone is willing to pay money to use an otherwise unused, extraneous space/house is indeed a profit by any measure.
I've never understood the need for a downpayment to purchase. If you can make the monthly payments that's all that should matter.
In theory I guess it protects against the costs of dealing with defaults or having people walk away from underwater mortgages. But on the other hand, all of that stuff could be insured against.
But on the other hand, all of that stuff could be insured against.
Thats exactly what PMI (Private mortgage insurance) covers. However if the insurance company doesn't think you're a good risk, then you might not be able to get that either. I have never looked at what criteria they use to grant or deny PMI. I've also never known anyone personally denied PMI.
It's risk mitigation for the banks. You don't have to put 20% down, but generally you'll have to pay an additional insurance (PMI) if you don't.
The downpayment requirements are much looser now then they used to be. Pretty much anyone in the US can get as low as 3 to 3.5% down, which means the down payment can easily be less than all the other home buying expenses (closing cost, inspection, title insurance, loan origination, moving, transfer taxes, ...). You also typically have a month before you need to make your first principle repayment, which helps offset the down payment.
Veterans, active service members, and people buying in qualified rural areas can get 0 down mortgages.
Depending on where you live, there might be further assistance available. Around here, the county offers (means tested) down-payment assistance loans that cover 100% the minimum down payment, and has an interest rate that is at least 2% lower than that of the main loan. They also wave all transfer taxes for all first time buyers.
Its to keep us uppity poors on the down low
Exactly. The entry is a hurdle for many when that money could be used for repairs.
It is called credit risk lol
When they say "the housing crisis", is that what the poors call the record profit boon?
That's just the ruling class acting blind, disguising as a neutral news source
Of course they are, landlords are buying the house for what you would and doubling the mortgage payment as your rent. It should be illegal for people/corporations to rent out more than one single family home.
Residential units are generally considered 4 units or less. Over 80% of landlords are just normal people who spend their hard earned money on properties like this. Mom and pop landowners are incentivized to rent out their units as quickly as possible. Corporations, on the other hand? They can buy up entire neighborhoods and rent a single unit out for years just to manipulate market prices in their favor.
Why don’t they just buy homes? Are they stupid?
That or they just didn’t think it was an appropriate joke.
It's so bad, I would happily accept the mega cities from judge dredd being built.
They'd still sit empty.
Pretty much. Some weird perverse incentive would make it worth keeping them empty.
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated. Our system fucking sucks and is designed to protect land owners which is why we're in this situation. This is fucking up our entire society, slowly bringing us down, we're losing to China. This change needs to happen soon otherwise we're going to see the working class get milked hard enough that our real economy will collapse.
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated
Who passes this law? Who signs it? My municipal and state governments are infested with real estate agents landlords, attorneys, and bankers, all of whom profit from artificially scarce housing.
Who passes this law? Who signs it?
Exactly. Exactly.
Our system fucking sucks and is designed to protect land owners which is why we’re in this situation.
I really don't see any change happening without.... drastic inturruption.
Build more housing. That's what you need to prioritize.
We have significantly more vacant units (around 15M) than homeless people (around 600k-1.5M by various estimates).
New dense energy efficient units connected to social services and green energy infrastructure would be great for everyone. But the idea that we just don't have residential space to house people is totally wrong.
A partial solution is to remove nimby laws that prevent accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and medium and high density housing. Then you use the tax laws to heavily punish corporate ownership of low and medium density housing, and make it progressively more expensive for mom and pop landlords after a reasonable number of properties.
Hopefully this would lower the cost for single family housing, while increasing supply and variety of rentals. But somehow you'd have to prevent end stage capitalist collusion from fixing prices so competition could actually work to drive down prices.
Do you like HOA's because this is how you get more HOA's -- if the laws won't protect the desired community development, people will work together to create it and the result is something less efficient and less open.
This is why libertarianism is nonsense. People will quickly recreate all the old rules when they relearn the lessons that lead to the creation of those old rules.
The sky is blue
my rental office rose my rend $200 and I couldn't afford deposit on a new place. am fucked.
If I could, I would pass a law saying that no corporation could own more than two dwelling structures. That still allows them to own things up to apartment high-rises. But only two.
No. You make it so that they cannot hold single family dwellings period unless for the purpose of listing and selling them to non-corporate individuals.
There are reasons why a business might actually need or benefit from having a single family dwelling in a way that aligns with their business. For instance a local theatre company owns two large homes here so that when traveling cast come for shows they have somewhere to house them without spending exorbitantly on hotel rooms for weeks at a time, and the cast get a more comfortable stay. The homes are typically occupied at least a portion of each month, and everyone involved benefits.
It's reasons like these I wouldn't want to put a total and complete ban on businesses owning single family homes, but in my opinion there should be a reasonable business justification for it and it needs to be very limited.
they'd just make nesting doll structured holding companies with all profits going to the top but any losses being contained within each branch
actually this sounds like a great idea BRB gotta register some LLCs in Delaware
What frustrates me is there doesn't seem to be anyone in a position to promote change to this problem that is really talking about it. They may pay it lip service but nothing beyond that.
It's a national problem, but policies that affect housing are mostly local. So you need to override local control with state/federal policy, or convince a 50,000 municipalities to change their laws.
And the few states that have passed reforms for zoning, etc. are getting sued to shit in court by the city/towns.
This problem was 50 years in the making, it would take more than 50 years to fix.
I totally agree this isn't a easy fix and it will take decades to change but I feel that should be a challenge for the US to start making the change not a reason to keep the status quo.
Just a shot in the dark, but are there any apparent problems with capping the rent at like half the mortgage? Or like 80%? Then there would be financial incentive to keep the tenant happy, to keep working, and keep the property in working order.
Of course, this does not take into account properties without mortgage, or properties where the housing was paid in part with liquid cash.
That will disproportionately punish small time landlords and incentivize megacorp landlords, which is probably not what you want
Yeah, any more alterations to the idea and it would be gull of wsge cases and confusing shit. Agreed
It also doesn’t take into account rising property taxes, business tax, rising maintenance costs. I’m not arguing in favor of these dirty landlord companies that jack up the rent at every opportunity, however you’d have to control interest rates and the ridiculous home prices if you want to keep rents reasonable based on a percentage of mortgage costs.
Have them throw a can of soup at a painting to raise awareness
Soup for my family...
What's that from?
It's the new thing privileged people are doing. Throwing soup at paintings in art gallerias in Europe. They target ones that are behind glass, "just a prank bro". Anyway it's all a ploy so they can "raise" awareness about the Whales, Tibet, or Firefly being cancelled or whatever cause de celebre is hot this week.
Actually solving issues is difficult and slow. Throwing stuff is easy and makes you feel good about yourself. And in the end, only the feelings of the children of privilege matter.
There's always talk about tax breaks for home owners...
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
That's what would fix it. Tax them out of the housing market slowly and.prices will go down as they get out of the business.
Indeed. Nothing about this addresses rental markets and general extreme cost of living. Rather, it finds new ways to prop up severely overvalued housing markets.
Housing costs are so high because it’s become an investment over a necessary place for a human to live. A correction is severely needed and long overdue, but the government works hard to keep values artificially high from zoning laws at the bottom to preventing corrections at the top.
That and most people just do the standard deductions.
So tax breaks mostly help the wealthy in mansions.
It's like how conservatives want to move income tax to sales tax. The wealthiest make a lot more than they spend. And when they spend it's usually thru some shady shit where they don't pay sales tax. Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a "company car" from a company they own.
At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.
Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.
Wouldn’t a tax hike only get passed through to the renter?
Not really, because the rental market does not behave like commodities do. Generally, you have to live within a reasonable distance of employment. For this and other reasons, renters are much more vulnerable and tend to get exploited far beyond the cost of the service.
Basically, if tenants had any more money to exploit, they would already take it. Rents are maximally high wherever possible to extract maximum money from people who need a place to live.
Consider the common joke that I pay this much in rent every month but the bank says I can’t afford a house where the mortgage would be substantially less.
That's why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
They could try to pass it on to consumers, but smaller landlords wouldn't have to pay it.
Making the biggest get out of the game first
Canada passed this law in 2022 addressing that:
Underused Housing Tax
Need a Land value tax and the ability to build medium/high density housing.
Because governments want housing prices to stay sky high. The canadian prime minister openly said he doesn't want housing prices to drop because too many people are using their houses as a retirement strategy. That's why there are so many government programs that support buying a house but none that support renting.
Yeah, the first time I learned about our current vice president, she was trying to allegedly give renters similar tax breaks in California.
I don't know what happened to that, but I was an immediate fan. Seeing as it never happened, smeh... Not sure what to think. But it's a very popular idea amongst those of us who can't afford to buy (most people in California.)
Or you know, just build more houses?
We've got 15 million vacant homes in the US.